I'd sincerely like to thank the moderator who called this very little joke "overrated" at +4.
Linearly additive, [-1,5] integer moderation is broken. I would love to see, as part of the "about" or "faq" on the left of/. pages, a statistical abstract of post moderations. At the very least, I'd like to see a histogram of posts' scores. I'll bet there are far more 5's than there are 3's. That's just plain wrong.
This isn't about karma, its about ordering the relevance/importance/whatnot of posts, and these are separate issues from posters' karma. What's a slashdotter to do? My personal leaning is toward lobbying Taco to implement log(percentile) scoring, maybe just as a user preference. Or skinnable scoring with user-defined functions, whaddaya think Taco?
IIRC, there were a lot of posters here circa the 2000 elections with all kinds of ideas on equitable voting schemes. Put some of that experience into devising a better moderation scheme and deluge the editors with stories and "ask slashdots" about it.
If you're posting from work, it's unlikely that anonymous slashdot accounts are enough to hide behind. I would figure that as someone who works at HP you would know this, so either you're offsite or SSHing around the firewall.
In fact, My employer is monitoring me right now, so let's give them a big round of applause for leveraging their core competencies, value-adding, and remembering that every client begins with "CLI" and there is no "I" in "Quit," and all that.
I am agog. What you have just described is worse than welfare. Not only does the state make an admittedly bad investment by subsidizing wind technologies, but it allows individuals to "invest" in it? So there is a barrier to entry for individual citizens receiving direct government subsidies to your pocket. As a previous post in this thread said, "It takes money to make money." Indeed.
Un-freakin'-believeable.
For the hundredth time today, I am so glad to be in America. How do you Euro-socio-crats contain the cognitive dissonance?
Nope. Rendering motion picture frames is "embarrassingly parallel" as my boss likes to say. For a feature length movie, you have circa 120000 frames that each can be rendered without any communication through memory to other frames being rendered.
You would be foolish to pay for interprocessor memory bandwidth when clusters are just as fast for that task.
I won't begrudge a foreign company's technology or expertise. I have no reason to doubt that Denmark already makes the best wind turbines, if you say that is the case. And yes, I have seen acres of wind farms here in the good ol' U.S. of A. but they exist because of subsidies. There is some reason behind the subsidies, like diversity for the sake of a robust infrastructure, but don't fool yourself into thinking that wind is comparably efficent to fossil fuels yet.
Denmark is talking about subsidizing wind beause it will make them feel green and globally conscious or something. If they say they are doing it to make money as you predicted, then they'll have to wait a very long time (my prediction.) It still is not economically viable as a main source of power.
Why would they expect to sell their technology abroad before it's in the best interest of others to buy from them?
I guess you are assuming that Denmark's effort will result in wind eventually becoming economically viable elsewhere (if they use Danish products), through increased efficiency due to the Danes' investment and expertise. This is still a long way off, if it happens at all. They're probably better off simply putting the money in a bank for the thirty to fifty years it will take for wind to be the power source of choice, at which time they could buy all the wind tech they needed.
I will refrain from making sweeping comments about the intelligence of certain idealogues who bash market economics. Making money takes money, yes. But more importantly it takes timing.
but won't it eventually lead to being an all-AI game? Isn't the point of big games, like MMORPGs to be that the people with no life and play 800 hours a week to have better characters than the casual gamer? With this system, you teach the AI to practice blacksmithing, let it run day and night for a few days, and come back with a master blacksmith. Just seems like you are taking out the challenge of the game...
And Bully for them, I say. The more potentially dehumanizing technology there is around, the more we are forced to consider what is quintessentially human. AI that plays your game for you might be a liberating experience, in that it puts you face to face with the conclusion that having no life and playing 800 hours a week is not worth anything after all.
I was assuming a delta impulse that pushed apart the two halves so that they would be separated by a distance equal to the diameter of the earth by the time they had traveled half of the lunar orbital radius. The biggest problem was the high speed of the asteroid (given in the film, I forget what it is) and the improbably short distance they gave, "half the distance to the moon." If you think about it, the problem amounts to instantaneously accelerating two rocks, each half of "the size of texas" to tens of thousands of miles an hour orthogonal to their path, so that it will miss the Earth in time.
The actual energy value I forget, but you're right that it would compare to something big like the sun's output. I think the only lesson learned is that we ought to have a plan worked out far in advance of ever using it.
Back when "Armageddon" was stinking up theaters nation-wide, I did a calculation in Mathematica using parameters given in the movie, e.g. "Half the distance to the moon," and "the size of Texas," etc., always giving that lovable band of roughnecks the benefit of the doubt and erring in their favor. For example I assumed that the asteroid had the density of water, that splitting the asteriod cost no energy, but separating the halves would require them to escape each other's gravity and just barely miss the Earth.
If I remember right, the feat they achieved would require the nuclear device they implanted to yield well over 10^40 Joules. More advance notice would lower this number greatly.
Which just goes to show you don't understand the position of science. Science only considers the natural world and can say nothing about the existence or non-existence of any supernatural being.
I understand perfectly the position of science; I am a scientist. As such, I disagree when others, in the name of science, claim to disprove the existence of anything (super|extra|non|hypo|infra|un)natural. You sound like you understand some of the limitations of science, and so it's not you I'm complaining about.
The problem lies in the fact that anyone involved in organizing one of these "debates" has an agenda that they consider to be more important than the actual free exchange of ideas. One other poster here said that they hold the debates to make creationists look like fools. I believe it. If the extreme young-Earth creationists they present look like fools and the only alternative given, by the design of the moderators and sponsors is, "There is no God," then the moderators and sponsors are actually subverting the spirit of science for their agenda.
Individual humans can work against their nature, and thank God for that. The world would look like a cross between Zimbabwe and a co-ed college dorm during a power outage otherwise.
There will always be a spectrum of compliance with social norms. You, calling upon logic and willpower to change human nature as a whole, will never make it happen. Communism (yes, even when "purely implemented") fails because you will NEVER get a large enough fraction of people to behave that way. The institutionalized atheism of many totalitarian states is in a constant state of struggle against human nature. In structuring civilization, you have to rely on the immutable parts of human nature, as well as the parts that we can make better through individual effort and social pressures.
I know many Christian Arabs who use the word "Allah" to describe God as they see Him. That's just part of the arabic language. Depending on where he was when he said it, Einstein may have actually used the word "Gott" in that quote posted here and all around. Does that mean he was not referring to "God?"
I only write this because I'm anticipating how this slashdot thread will evolve.... It is far too rare to see a discussion on evolution that admits much room for alternatives between "10000 year Earth" and "Science has disproven the existence of God." Full disclosure: I am a Christian who believes in an 8-15 billion year old universe spawned by a "Big Bang" event. I believe biology is the result of evolution from inanimate, self-reproducing molecules up to and including human evolution, by processes indistinguishable from chance. I believe that human consciousness is the spiritual touch that makes us uniquely "in the image of God."
I got a call this morning from someone asking me to listen to "Focus on the Family" this morning because they were playing a tape of a debate held at Stanford between a creationist and evolutionist. I was immediately turned off because the creationist would make sweeping statements without support, like "evolution is based on bad and shaky evidence." Also, the evolutionist was assumed by the audience to be driven by an anti-God agenda, and gave no evidence to the contrary.
If the reason for holding these "debates" is to foster intellectual honesty in "both camps," then at least they should admit that there are a great number of reasonable people who hold neither of these publicized views. By limiting the debate to these two views they present the undecided with a false dichotomy, and by golly, with as effective as science is elsewhere, that must mean that there is no God!
Hey, that was five spelling mistakes in a "30 second rant" by someone talking about being in the elementary teaching profession, where spelling is one of the subjects taught. I think my comments were relevant.
BTW, I have taught too, at the university level. The job I have right now pays three times as much, and is only 1.5 times as hard. Teaching is not the hardest job in the world, but unless you're on a real mission to do it, it's not worth it. I may go back to it someday when I'm more comfortable and can afford the pay cut.
It's already 70mm wide. IMAX rolls the film "sideways," so the short dimension of the visible frame is the width of the film, and the long dimension of the frame is along the direction of the roll. Any standard 70mm film would have to be retransferred to the IMAX 70mm sideways format.
The Orion project was about getting to another star as fast as possible. Consider though, that "as fast as possible" means on a historic timescale, not merely short transit time. Given the technology we have (and had at the birth of Orion), making x BTU's worth of thermonuclear bombs and utilizing them at even 5% efficiency was a faster way to get a working craft to Sirius than trying to design an engine with controlled fusion.
Keep in mind that all controlled, sustained nuclear reactions we have engineered to date are fission reactions. An inefficiently converted but uncontrolled fusion reaction (aka Hydrogen bomb) will still give more "bang for the buck," literally and figuratively.
Slashdot Mirror
Linearly additive, [-1,5] integer moderation is broken. I would love to see, as part of the "about" or "faq" on the left of /. pages, a statistical abstract of post moderations. At the very least, I'd like to see a histogram of posts' scores. I'll bet there are far more 5's than there are 3's. That's just plain wrong.
This isn't about karma, its about ordering the relevance/importance/whatnot of posts, and these are separate issues from posters' karma. What's a slashdotter to do? My personal leaning is toward lobbying Taco to implement log(percentile) scoring, maybe just as a user preference. Or skinnable scoring with user-defined functions, whaddaya think Taco?
IIRC, there were a lot of posters here circa the 2000 elections with all kinds of ideas on equitable voting schemes. Put some of that experience into devising a better moderation scheme and deluge the editors with stories and "ask slashdots" about it.
In fact, My employer is monitoring me right now, so let's give them a big round of applause for leveraging their core competencies, value-adding, and remembering that every client begins with "CLI" and there is no "I" in "Quit," and all that.
Heh. Well. Um... Ah, yes. You firewall guys know I'm kidding right? uh hello?
Wow! You could write a DisplayPDF driver in SVG+javascript and port the whole MacOS X desktop to Mozilla!
Yeah, no kidding. Everybody knows that MP3 == Communism
...a Beowulf cluster of these would look like Chewbacca.
Come on guys, Worldcom?
Un-freakin'-believeable.
For the hundredth time today, I am so glad to be in America. How do you Euro-socio-crats contain the cognitive dissonance?
You would be foolish to pay for interprocessor memory bandwidth when clusters are just as fast for that task.
Denmark is talking about subsidizing wind beause it will make them feel green and globally conscious or something. If they say they are doing it to make money as you predicted, then they'll have to wait a very long time (my prediction.) It still is not economically viable as a main source of power.
I guess you are assuming that Denmark's effort will result in wind eventually becoming economically viable elsewhere (if they use Danish products), through increased efficiency due to the Danes' investment and expertise. This is still a long way off, if it happens at all. They're probably better off simply putting the money in a bank for the thirty to fifty years it will take for wind to be the power source of choice, at which time they could buy all the wind tech they needed.
I will refrain from making sweeping comments about the intelligence of certain idealogues who bash market economics. Making money takes money, yes. But more importantly it takes timing.
And Bully for them, I say. The more potentially dehumanizing technology there is around, the more we are forced to consider what is quintessentially human. AI that plays your game for you might be a liberating experience, in that it puts you face to face with the conclusion that having no life and playing 800 hours a week is not worth anything after all.
The actual energy value I forget, but you're right that it would compare to something big like the sun's output. I think the only lesson learned is that we ought to have a plan worked out far in advance of ever using it.
If I remember right, the feat they achieved would require the nuclear device they implanted to yield well over 10^40 Joules. More advance notice would lower this number greatly.
The language is defined by a standards body in a series of RFCs:
- An ICFP compiler will take any input and produce an entry which wins the currently open ICFP programming contest
- Feature freeze
Right now there are no standards-compliant compilers, but, that shouldn't matter. There are no standards-compliant C++ compilers either.I understand perfectly the position of science; I am a scientist. As such, I disagree when others, in the name of science, claim to disprove the existence of anything (super|extra|non|hypo|infra|un)natural. You sound like you understand some of the limitations of science, and so it's not you I'm complaining about.
The problem lies in the fact that anyone involved in organizing one of these "debates" has an agenda that they consider to be more important than the actual free exchange of ideas. One other poster here said that they hold the debates to make creationists look like fools. I believe it. If the extreme young-Earth creationists they present look like fools and the only alternative given, by the design of the moderators and sponsors is, "There is no God," then the moderators and sponsors are actually subverting the spirit of science for their agenda.
10 PRINT "I WIN!"
There will always be a spectrum of compliance with social norms. You, calling upon logic and willpower to change human nature as a whole, will never make it happen. Communism (yes, even when "purely implemented") fails because you will NEVER get a large enough fraction of people to behave that way. The institutionalized atheism of many totalitarian states is in a constant state of struggle against human nature. In structuring civilization, you have to rely on the immutable parts of human nature, as well as the parts that we can make better through individual effort and social pressures.
I know many Christian Arabs who use the word "Allah" to describe God as they see Him. That's just part of the arabic language. Depending on where he was when he said it, Einstein may have actually used the word "Gott" in that quote posted here and all around. Does that mean he was not referring to "God?"
ACs are worth modding funny too. That was a damn fine joke.
Wow. All this will happen when human nature itself changes improbably in the particular way you desire.
I got a call this morning from someone asking me to listen to "Focus on the Family" this morning because they were playing a tape of a debate held at Stanford between a creationist and evolutionist. I was immediately turned off because the creationist would make sweeping statements without support, like "evolution is based on bad and shaky evidence." Also, the evolutionist was assumed by the audience to be driven by an anti-God agenda, and gave no evidence to the contrary.
If the reason for holding these "debates" is to foster intellectual honesty in "both camps," then at least they should admit that there are a great number of reasonable people who hold neither of these publicized views. By limiting the debate to these two views they present the undecided with a false dichotomy, and by golly, with as effective as science is elsewhere, that must mean that there is no God!
BTW, I have taught too, at the university level. The job I have right now pays three times as much, and is only 1.5 times as hard. Teaching is not the hardest job in the world, but unless you're on a real mission to do it, it's not worth it. I may go back to it someday when I'm more comfortable and can afford the pay cut.
So tell me again, why aren't you a teacher anymore?
"it was harder then the CIO job and you have infenet more responsibility... its still to fucking hard.... for 2 years in elementry ed"
Oh. You're right. There are several good reasons in there.
It's already 70mm wide. IMAX rolls the film "sideways," so the short dimension of the visible frame is the width of the film, and the long dimension of the frame is along the direction of the roll. Any standard 70mm film would have to be retransferred to the IMAX 70mm sideways format.
Keep in mind that all controlled, sustained nuclear reactions we have engineered to date are fission reactions. An inefficiently converted but uncontrolled fusion reaction (aka Hydrogen bomb) will still give more "bang for the buck," literally and figuratively.